According to the Wall Street Journal, a lawsuit claims New York City’s gifted and talented testing process is flawed. A group of parents filed the lawsuit against the Dept. of Ed. late in the afternoon Thursday, May 16, 2013. The group of parents claim the sibling preference in scoring isn’t fair due to the number of limited seats available for the must sought after gifted and talented program here in NYC. The DOE did change the sibling policy for scoring preference in October 2012 but soon retracted it due to parents complaining about the change – all of whom have more than one child so it was somewhat of a self-serving complaint against the DOE. The DOE did originally stated in their G&T handbook in October 2012 that there will be a drastic change to the sibling policy for G&T placement which was basically making it a fair playing level field. This was then removed from the gifted and talented testing handbook in January 2013.

I do feel for these parents who had to go to the extreme of filing a lawsuit against the department of education but when there’s little to no communication from this establishment there’s no other recourse except working through the legal system. We’ll see what happens next. Just when I thought the ongoing snafus from the department of ed. would end…well, I was totally wrong on that one. We’ll see how this impacts the future scoring of the NNAT-2 test and OLSAT test for this coming school year. That is, if the DOE will even use these tests any longer due to Pearson’s (the test publisher) screw ups.

The objection wasn’t just to the elimination of the sibling policy but to the way it was eliminated – illegally. To change a Chancellor’s regulation requires a 45 day public comment period, which wasn’t done. Instead, the new policy was simply published (and, quite frankly, hidden) in the G&T handbook.